No, it's not, sir. The nice part about a maritime lien is if you have a ship in your port—and it doesn't matter whether I were a U.S. attorney based in Seattle or a Canadian lawyer based in Vancouver—and you are threatening to arrest the ship, you don't arrest a ship lightly. It's not something you do willingly, because you have a whole operation rolling. You can arrest a ship, and I have, in the past, arrested a ship in a two-and-a-half-hour period. The Federal Court of Canada is very good. They have a duty officer. They can open the courthouse after hours. You issue a pleading. You issue an affidavit. You can arrest the ship.
Loading operations don't stop just because a ship is under arrest. Unloading operations don't stop. What you are telling a shipowner is that vessel cannot leave the port until this matter is resolved, and the matter of resolve being that either you post security and pay the letter of undertaking from one of the international P and I clubs, or you put money in court or put up a bail bond or a surety. The arrest is something that will very quickly focus an owner, and if the owner is in Vanuatu or Liberia or Cyprus or anywhere else around the world, if his or her ship is in the port of Vancouver and it is under arrest, the P and I club correspondent in Vancouver for that particular ship will be on the phone asking what they need to do to get the ship out of arrest.
Half the time that conversation takes place before the arrest is even done, because the threat of arrest is sufficient. So you'll never be chasing an owner around the world. You'll have their undivided attention, because their asset is right in your own port. A maritime lien is a very strong tool, and the arrest of a ship is a very strong tool to resolve disputes.